French Freemasons Go Public to Oppose LePen in French Presidential Elections

French freemasons finally take a seemingly principled stand over the French presidential elections, but only because their own agenda is being threatened, writes Pam Barker

Pam Barker | Director of the TLB Europe Reloaded Project

The elite must be genuinely worried. For the first time ever, French freemasons have made a public statement about the upcoming presidential elections, the first round of which takes place this coming Sunday.

A few days ago seven federations of French masonic lodges, which represent half of the masonic membership (up to 160,000), made their feelings known about several things but confined themselves to two particular injunctions: don’t vote for Marine Le Pen’s Front National party, and don’t abstain.

In the name of humanist values, they have denounced the populist recourse to feelings of national pride and group identity, typical of the politics of the Front National and the Europe-wide populist movement currently. Defending French republican values, which can be taken to mean the equality of all citizens in a secular, democratic state with equal access to necessary public services, they are clearly worried about the divisions that would appear to come with an appeal to nationalism. Indeed, Marine Le Pen has recently promised to close the borders to France’s continuing wave of migrants and refugees.

Christophe Habas (pictured), the grand master of the famous Grand Orient de France lodge, the principal lodge of around 55,000 members, expressed concern that voters will reject mainstream parties if they aren’t responsive to the problems of ordinary people, especially the young, in more creative ways, if they don’t give them a cause to hope for something better. He instructed the mainstream parties to re-evaluate their approach and find a way to go beyond the commodification of society that has lured young people, to pull them more towards a sense of the common good.

They are indeed overtly criticizing neoliberalist economics with its deregulation of everything in the service of banks, multinationals and employers. Kudos to them.

Abstention is also a problem and has been since 1979 when participation rates in national elections started to decline in Europe across all age groups. But it’s become especially critical among young voters. In 2014 across Europe, the voting rate in the 18-24 age group was just 28%, with 51% for those 55 and above. Indeed, a La Croix report from last month shows that 48% of the 18-25 age bracket will not vote in the first round of the presidentials on Sunday. Another report shows that the Front National and other non-mainstream parties are looking increasingly more attractive to the voting youth because of harsh austerity programs Europe-wide, which have caused significant unemployment problems. Clearly they are right to be concerned about the youth vote.

But isn’t all this too little too late?

Where were they when Greece was (and still is) getting skewered by the crippling private bank loans that will permanently keep the country in hock, and the austerity policies of the IMF, European Central Bank and the German finance ministry that Greeks expressly voted against? When people lost their jobs, had their pensions cut repeatedly, their taxes raised, their public services and public assets stripped.

Ditto for the UK, when Europe went silent over the same cruel economic policies David Cameron’s Conservatives implemented against the poor, sick and unemployed? Which gave the UN reason to say their rights had been violated.

Where were they when globalist presidential candidate and Rothschild darling, Emmanuel Macron was brought in by the current so-called ‘left wing’ government of Francois Hollande to enact the Macron Law and El Khomri Law, retrenching workers’ rights and job security in favor of the employer class?

Where were they when any French company has been closed and had its manufacturing operations moved to a cheaper country? Such as the one Macron presided over – the selling off of French company Alstom to General Electric. Such as the one currently underway, the Whirlpool factory in Amiens.

Why aren’t they attacking the standard French government practice of ghettoizing immigrants, historical as well as new, and poor people into banlieux that have become powder kegs for very good reason?

Why aren’t they attacking the illegal wars that are creating the migrants in the first place? Whoa, that’s a big one …

Haven’t they noticed that the political parties most capable of delivering such civic-minded values, usually those on the left, have vanished, to be replaced by right-wing parties masquerading as ‘left’? As many commentators have long observed, the true left is dead.

It turns out that Marine Le Pen – who wants to wrest French national sovereignty away from the globalist anti-democratic EU, who wants to stop the wave of migration which is costly and damaging to employment opportunities for French nationals (which includes immigrants), who wants to return to the French franc (how many economists have said that the single currency is a disaster for any country that isn’t Germany!) – is the only one of the high-profile candidates with a real chance of winning who is calling the proverbial spade a shovel and identifying the globalist agenda by name. No wonder that the masonic banking elite won’t fund her campaign.

How predictable it is of the masonic globalists, who ignore the devastation of economic neoliberalism on the population while it’s underway, yet turn on the citizenry to accuse them of racism and hate on the social policy front. A typical yet utterly deceptive separation of economic policy from social policy, which lulls us into ignoring capitalism-on-steroids neoliberalism, while we legitimately fret about the destruction of our cultures, social services and jobs, and are made to feel bad for doing so.

The first round of the presidential elections takes place on Sunday, April 23, to be followed by the second round on Sunday, May 7.